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Springfield's historic district goes 3-D

Professor Jong-Hyun Lim of the Savannah College of Art and Design talks with Springfield business owner Paul Lindsay about plans for the city’s historic district.

Students made posters for some of the buildings in Springfield, including this one on a house at 704 N. Maple St.

G.G. Rigsby/Effiingham Now

Some area residents studied a model made by Savannah College of Art and Design students of downtown Springfield. From left are Elizabeth Hursey, clerk of Superior Court; Eustice Ford; Kenny Usher, Springfield city councilman; Patricia Hall; and Doris Derrick.

G.G. Rigsby/Effingham Now One of the posters made by SCAD students. This one is about the Cutcher residence, at 502 Early St.

G.G. Rigsby/Effingham Now One of the posters made by SCAD students was about the United Methodist Campground.

G.G. Rigsby/Effingham Now One of the posters made by SCAD students was about the United Methodist Campground.

G.G. Rigsby/Effingham Now Looking at the model of Springfield, from left, are Effingham County Commissioner Reggie Loper, Jamey Stancell, president of the Springfield Merchants Association, and Doris Derrick.

G.G. Rigsby/Effingham Now One of the posters made by SCAD students was about Otis service station.

Eight historic buildings in downtown Springfield are represented by 3-D images in Google Earth, with the goal to add another 70-plus buildings, creating a virtual historic district.

Some graduate students from the Savannah College of Art and Design who are helping the city with documentation to create a historic district presented their latest results to the community at a meeting in the historic courthouse on March 8.

About 40 people attended the presentation by students of Professor Jong-Hyun Lim, with most lingering afterward to ask questions.

Students measured buildings and worked with volunteers in the school’s architectural department, who used computer-assisted design programs to create the 3-D models.

A virtual historic district would be great advertising for the city, said City Manager Brett Bennett. The city has been working with SCAD students for two quarters to update a historic buildings survey done in 1998.

Ten SCAD students and five volunteers researched old buildings in Springfield. They took 3,300 photographs and filled out nearly 300 survey forms in work that would have cost the city $28,000 if it had paid professionals to do it.

The city paid SCAD $5,000 for the work.

“This is a gift,” said City Council member Kenny Usher. “Everyone tells us we’ve got a diamond in the rough, you need to pursue it.”

He said it will take some resources to do more, but if citizens are shown a path, he thinks they’ll support the idea.

Springfield already has two buildings on the National Register of Historic Places — the historic courthouse and the old jail.

The students said four more buildings have potential to be listed on the register — Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Mars Theater, the United Methodist Church Campground and City Hall.

Those six buildings and two more are the ones already represented in three dimensions on Google Earth. The other two are the new courthouse and a building housing Ever After Bridal Boutique and Old Town Antiques.

The professor and some of his graduate students will be talking about the Springfield project at meetings soon, at the High-Tech Heritage International Conference May 2-4 in Amherst, Mass., and at the Vernacular Architecture Forum June 6-10 in Madison, Wis.

“How cool is it that they’ll be talking about Springfield at these conferences,” Bennett said.

Two other recent SCAD projects with Springfield focused on a master plan for downtown and how to transform the building that houses City Hall into an economic driver.

“This is a great opportunity to see where we are through the surveys and to see where we can go from here,” said Jamey Stancell, president of the Springfield Merchants Association. “I think this is just the beginning of what we can do.”